Word: clytemnestras
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Electra. Wide-ruling Agamemnon, home from Troy triumphant, straightway is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. who usurps dominion of Mycenae. Agamemnon's son Orestes is spirited to safety by his tutor, but the dead king's daughter Electra is held in duress till she comes of age, and then is wed precautiously to a poor farmer-the sons of such a man, Aegisthus reasons, cannot hope to occupy a throne, and therefore would not dare to kill him. Vain precautions. Orestes returns secretly and at Electra's furious insistence, slaughters the usurper...
...Sartre explains the situation. Orestes returns to Argos with his tutor and discovers the town still guilt ridden over the murder of his father. The town is preparing for its yearly ritual of penance. Orestes watches Electra vent her long standing hostility toward Aegistheus and Clytemnestra, and he begins his own debate with Zeus. Orestes is at this point an intellectual observer--detached, ironic, rational...
...Orestes observes the rite, during which Electra defies Zeus by performing a joyous dance. Just as the town is nearly liberated from its guilt by her own freedom, Zeus makes a sign of his presence, and Electra fails. But her dance nonetheless forces Orestes to murder Aegistheus and Clytemnestra. Aegistheusis too weary of repentence to resist...
Myra Rubn, as Electra, possesses the same virtues. Sartre's characters express no psychological insight, but act on the basis of moral imperative. Miss Rubin makes Electra understandable at least in Sartre's terms. Anne Lilly Kerr and Philip Rhodes, as Clytemnestra and Aegistheus, were far from subtle. But their performances, again were sound and moving...
...resemble the caryatids on the portico of the Acropolis' Erechtheum. The modern Greek rendering of the play has a venomous and vibrant intimacy that the English translation, transmitted at the City Center on transistor earphones, fails to reflect. In a cast that achieves a triumph of ensemble playing, Clytemnestra is coolly reptilian, and Aegisthus is a strutting upstart of self-aggrandizement who yet meets his implacable doom with dignity...